Games Engaging Customers

In Innovation Excellence:  About game dynamics engaging your customers.   Includes a number of examples I had not heard of.   Also makes an often forgotten point about its linkage to crowdsourcing: " ... Gamification is the use of game methods and game thinking in order to engage users or solve problems. It is an innovative crowdsourcing technique which is gaining increasingly widespread acceptance in business, education and research.  ... " 

Gamification and Sales

An example of using Gamification for sales support.    " .... created a remote online customer sales chat platform that implements gamification to encourage remote workers to excel, using social influence to sell. He is an expert in using game mechanics in a non-game context to incentivize remote workers to achieve success by clearly defining benchmark performance goals – creating healthy competition as they compete for points toward free products and more. ... " 

Future of Laundry

Though it may seem an odd topic for here, have for a long time followed innovations in the process of doing the laundry.  Despite it seeming a very mundane thing, it combines advanced materials  technology, leading edge chemistry, devices and convincing consumers to change their behaviors.  Here some future concepts:  Article in Fast Company.

Air Interfaces

In GigaOM: Saw something similar at graphics show.   Required some hard to manage setup, but was impressively mysterious. But that example was display only and not interactive.  Here an  interactive display that floats in the air.  The company is Displair,

Glass App Store

In Mashable: A Google Glass App store is planned by next year.  This will be very useful indication of exactly how serious developers for this new computing format will be to deliver value.

Small Data Becoming Big Data

In SmartData Collective, By Mark van Rijmenam
" ... small data can become big data by cleverly combining various data sets with different data formats; Combine weather data with your restaurant’s sales data to discover the impact of rain on your items sold and as such adjust your purchasing behaviour. Combine your customer data with their sentiment online to surprise them and create long-lasting relationships. Track how your customers behave through your shop and combine it with your sales data to see how you can adjust and improve your floor plan. Or combine online sales data with offline customer profiles to see how you can optimize your multi-channel approach for your small retail shop.... " 

My comments:  Interesting, but I dislike the name 'small data' as much as I disliked 'big data' before it ascended the hype ladder.  Data is useful if it is the right combination of private, public, large, small, stable or volatile.  It is useful if it solves a decision problem that improves something.  Lets quit pasting names on things.  Lets work on delivering specific value.

Robotic Cleaning

In IEEE Spectrum:  As might be expected we avidly explored the future of cleaning.  In particular we examined robotic approaches. Watching development and commercialization of methods like the Roomba.  In particular it is quite difficult to clean multiple, irregular surfaces in home environments.  Here is a new idea, using multiple small robotic motes.   Just an early  concept for now, but interesting to consider the idea in outline.   " ... Mab is a self cleaning system consisting of 908 robots which clean the surface of a  floor with a drop touching and trapping the dirt particles on the floor. These robots also fulfill the task of feeding the system energy by capturing solar energy in its wings. The second component of the Mab is the core, which the robots returns to, and this central part handles multiple tasks: it generates the mixture of water with an additive that gives higher surface tension and a pleasant odor to the water; it is controlling the robot based on information they are providing of the environment; receiving contaminated droplets and filters it to remove the dirt from the water, saving the highest percentage possible and cleans its walking surfaces. ... "